The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“Yeah, Beth told me.” Then I regretted my words.

“What were you doing over there?” he said.

“I didn’t have any bread to catch the bus, and I thought you might be around.”

He looked at me curiously. I took a flat pick out of my pocket and began tuning the first string on the guitar. The room was silent a moment.

Then he said, “Take a look at the rainbow I got on a worm this morning,” and lifted a twenty-inch trout out of the sink by the gill. The iridescent band of blue and pink and sunlight was still bright along the sides. “I had the drag screwed all the way down, and I still couldn’t horse him out. I had to wade him up on a sandbar. If you can keep your ass out of jail today, we’ll go out again this evening.”

“My check ought to be here today. What if I pick up the tab for a beerbust and a picnic this afternoon?”

“That sounds commendable, Zeno. But I already went to the mailbox, and your check ain’t here. Also, before we slide into anything else, the old man wants to talk with you.”

He opened up the trout’s stomach with a fish knife and scooped out the entrails with his hand.

“How involved is that going to be?” I said.

“It’s just his way. He wants to talk a few minutes.”

“Say, I know I’m getting free rent here, and maybe becoming an instant sniper is pretty stupid, but like you said, it’s my fall.”

“You are the most paranoid bastard I’ve ever met. Look, he was going to go a property bond for you. I mean put the whole place on the line. OK, big deal. But give him his innings. He’s all right.”

This was the first time I had seen Buddy becom

e defensive about his father.

“OK,” I said.

Buddy worked the iron pump over the trout and scraped out the blood from the ridge of bone on the inside with his thumbnail.

“All root, all reet,” he said, and lit the kindling in the stove. “A few lemon rings and slices of onion, and we’ll dine on the porch and do up some of this fine Mexican laughing grass.”

“Your father came to my room while we were in the hospital and said he tried to shoot someone once.”

“I’m surprised he would tell you about that.”

“He was pretty intent on making a point.”

“That’s something he keeps filed away in a dark place. But by God, he tried to do it, all right. When I was a kid, we used to live over by Livingston, and every day I climbed over this guy’s barbed wire to fish in his slough. I climbed over it enough until it was broken down on the ground, and thirty of his cows got out on the highway The next morning he caught me at the slough with a horse quirt. It only took him about a dozen licks, but he cut through the seat of my overalls with it. I had blood in my shoes when I walked into the house, and that’s the only time I’ve ever seen the old man look the way he did then.”

The trout broiled in the butter inside the pan, and Buddy squeezed a lemon along the delicate white-and-pink meat.

“So do I march up to talk with your father or wait around?” I said.

“No, you take a beer out of the icebox, and then we eat. If you want to boogie down the road then, and not blow five minutes with the old man, that’s OK. We’ll catch a couple of brews and worm fish along the river. Don’t fret your bowels about it. Everything’s cool.”

We ate out on the front porch, with the breeze blowing up through the pines from the river. It was almost cold in the shade of the porch, and Mr. Riordan’s four Appaloosas and his one thoroughbred and Arabian stood like pieces of sunlit stone in the lot next to the barn. Beyond the house, the edges of the canyon and the cliffs were razor blue against the sky.

I was eating the last piece of trout with a slice of onion when I heard Mr. Riordan step up on the side of the porch. He had slipped his overalls straps down over his shoulders so that they hung below his waist, and the red handkerchief tied around his neck was wet with perspiration. He reached into the bib of his overalls and took out a small cigar that was burned at the tip. Buddy’s face became vacant while he cleaned off the tin plates.

“I guess you get pretty serious when you decide to do something,” he said.

He lit his cigar, and his gray eyes looked through the smoke and lighted match without blinking.

“I thought we had an understanding back there at the hospital,” he said.

“It wasn’t something I planned. I just have a bad way of letting the burner get too hot until something starts to melt at the wrong moment.”